No Lazy Loading. Rendering is not 100% accurate. The comparison intentionally oversees areas where other services are better, specially the ability to reproduce and render a website accurately.
@whoisjuan Partially agree with you! Try to build a service that works with any URL on the Internet as input is not a trivial thing. In order to have a quick response back, the process tries to block ads/trackers, and occasionally this caused some sites don't work as expected.
Pros: It works fine 80% of time, getting the screenshot back under the 30s π
@kikobeats That makes sense. The reason why I mentioned it, it's because I also have one of these services and they are a pain in the ass to build (https://getscreenshot.rasterwise...)... I have nailed a lot of rendering scenarios that are hard to achieve. I can share some ideas with you if you want. Send me a PM.
πHello, Hunters!
I'm so excited to present to you Microlink screenshots, a programmatic way to take a screenshot of any website.
Q: Yet another Screenshot as a service?
Yes! but you will find this one is completely different.
Q: Why is this different?
What makes it stand out from the rest is the server-side solution: the screenshot image will be served from a CDN, being available globally and you wonβt have to worry about downloading or storing it.
Q: Why is this better?
This allows the service to provide some extra things there, like automagically refreshing the screenshot after a time: this means the screenshot always reflects the content behind the target URL π€―.
Q: Will the screenshot be fancy?
So fancy.
Microlink screenshots support browser overlay (light and dark theme) and custom background color or gradient π.
Q: How configurable is it?
You can hide, click, wait or scroll to elements. Also, you can emulate a list of 71 devices. The screenshot can be full page and the output can be PNG or JPEG.
Q: Can you block trackers, popups, etc?
Sure, this is done by default.
Q: Cookie banners as well?
Yes, specially cookie banners π.
Q: Sounds good, but what about pricing?
It starts at $0. The API has a daily rate limit; If you reach it and you need more, you can jump to a pro plan, they are intentionally cheap.
Q: How can I be sure all this is true?
We did a comparison table of similar services and what kind of features they offer: http://bit.ly/saasforscreenshot
Just want to share a good case suggested by a user: You can convert anything you need to see into a screenshot, e.g. Google Maps URLs.
https://api.microlink.io/?url=ht...
π
@kikobeats now that pupeteer is firefox ok, maybe include parameter of browser emulation : chrome or FF or safari (i see in your landing page). Today it use a chrome headless engine ? cheers !
@kikobeats if you clients are devs, today there is 3 rendering engines. Chromium (chrome + edge) ; gecko for FF and webkit for Safari. Its always nice to see the rendering on all 3 with 1 call. But i get if you are not targeting them
@kikobeats Let's take an example of Blogger, Suppose I am a blogger and I am going to write an article about the top 10 free themes for Blogger/Wordpress. So being a blogger I know the Themes URL now I just need to paste a link and my screenshots are ready to use. Now I can add screenshots in our article. Thanks
@kikobeats I am Curious to use this service for my blog article. I also have a suggestion, is it possible to take bulk Screenshots or bulk URLs at a time. If it is possible then it can save a lot of time.
@kikobeats I am going to rewrite my article "11 Free Resources to Practice Java Skills like a Pro" using @MiccrolinkScreenshots, Right now It has only a few Pics of the logo of websites but later it will have all 11 Pics of all sources I have written in my article.
Hello Kiko, I tried your service, it works very nice! Congrats! :)
I've been thinking to implement it in web app that I'm working on, so I was wondering if there is any way to define screen width in pixels, rather than device name? Thank You.
@jakov_radojevic
We're using imagekit.io for hosting the screenshots. It's a specific CDN oriented for image supporting transformations on the fly.
For example, suppose this is the URL of your screenshot
https://ik.imagekit.io/microlink...
We can create a thumbnail of the snapshot just adding the transformation as part of the URL
https://ik.imagekit.io/microlink...
All the transformations available are here: https://docs.imagekit.io/?ref=da...
I understand the way the transformation should be added into the URL is not too friendly (right now, you need to modify the original URL), so I'm going to work in a more affordable way for doing that π
GetScreenshot